An Unshackled Internet:
If Joe Howe Were Designing Cyberspace

Abstract: Contrary to entrenched mythology, Joseph
Howe's acquittal did not secure freedom of the press in Canada. We
have a panoply of laws restricting publication, and a cultural
propensity for deferring to authority. Lately, Canadian
university administrators have been especially prone to accept
censorship, but they made a strategic blunder when they rushed
to delete the Usenet group alt.fan.karla-homolka. Doing so
lent tacit support to the position that Usenet nodes are
publishers, not common carriers. Censorship of Usenet groups
is a blunt instrument, since much socially useful expression
gets tossed out with the bath water. The Internet's unique,
many-to-many mode of communication should be a powerful
democratizing force. Oppressed groups should think twice
about endorsing greater powers of censorship for state
authorities, since such powers seem likely to be used against
them.

In preparing a talk about the Internet and censorship, an obvious
first step is to see what the Internet itself has to say on the
subject. As everyone knows the signal-to-noise ratio on the
Internet tends to be dreadfully low, and the quality of
information it contains is often suspect. But one area that the
net documents capably and comprehensively is the net itself. The
Internet is surely one of the most self-absorbed and
self-referential institutions in recent human history. So I
spent some time poking around the net, reading up on past and
present battles over free speech and the Internet.

Among the first things I discovered was what a prominent place
the University of Waterloo holds in the annals of Internet
censorship. A formative battle over Usenet censorship began here
in 1988. It centred on one of the funniest ethnic jokes I've
ever heard. Now I'd love to repeat the joke, and if this were a
meeting of the Rotary Club, or the local Presbytery, or even a
sewing circle, I would certainly do so. But alas . . . this is a
college campus, so we're much more severely restricted in what we
can say. Besides, there may be some Scottish or Jewish
ventriloquists in the audience, and I might offend them. And now
I've ruined the joke anyway. [1]

I intended that anecdote as the sort of light introductory banter
a speaker uses to soften up an audience for the serious stuff to
follow. But it does have a serious side.

I guarantee you there are some people in the audience who are
uncomfortable at my tacit admission that I found a joke about
Jews and Scots funny. After all, Jews have suffered heinous
persecution because of the stereotypes often embodied in ethnic
humor. On the other hand, I guarantee you that there are also
people in this room who are dying to hear the joke. There may
even be people in whom both these emotions are warring with each
other.

That's why it alarmed me that Ursula Franklin, after giving us a
trenchant, crystal-clear analysis of the history of communication
modes among humans, suddenly tossed those qualities of trenchancy
and clarity to the wind and suggest that human expression be
regulated like smoking or toxic waste disposal, with the
recipient given power of regulation. [2]

With the greatest respect for Professor Franklin, a woman I
admire enormously, human expression is not the moral equivalent
of smoking or toxic waste, and one person's right to expression
must not be subject to another person's thin skin.

To quote James Madison inexactly, because I am going from memory:

As long as there are such things as printing and
writing, there will be libels: it is an evil arising
out of a much greater good. And as to those who are
locking up the press because it produces monsters, they
ought to consider that so do the sun and the Nile; and
that is something for the world to bear some particular
inconveniences arising from the general blessings, than
to be wholly deprived of fire and water. [3]

Most journalists these days have been to university, and one of
the things university trains us to do is to complete a writing
task approximately 37 seconds before it is due. So I was a bit
nonplussed when Jeff Shallit insisted some months ago that I give
him the title of my talk. Not having the faintest idea what I
was going to speak about, I fell back on that old chestnut of
Canadian journalism, Joseph Howe.

Joseph Howe was a 19th Century populist Nova Scotian politician
and newspaperman, and the defendant in a celebrated libel trial.
The story of Joseph Howe's speech to the jury is one of the
defining myths of my trade. W. H. Kesterson's history of
Canadian journalism calls it "the most momentous freedom-of-
the-press precedent" in the first half of the 19th Century. [4] I
think one of the reasons journalists like this story so much is
that, as reporters, we're forced to sit through so many terrible
speeches. It would be nice to think that one magnificent oration
had secured our fundamental freedoms. Unfortunately, it is a
myth. Howe's speech accomplished many things, but securing
freedom of the press in Canada wasn't among them.

It was, however, an electrifying address. In 1835, Howe had
published a pseudonymous letter criticizing the corrupt
magistrates who ran Halifax. He was charged with seditious
libel, an offense for which truth was not a defense. He acted as
his own lawyer. And in a packed courtroom--a room that today
serves as the legislative library in Province House at Halifax--
Howe spoke for six hours and 15 minutes, ending in a pyrotechnic
flourish:

Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty, brought by
your fathers from the venerable temples in Britain, to
be quenched and trodden out on the simple alters they
have raised? . . . Will you, my countrymen, the
descendants of these men, warmed by their blood,
inheriting their language, and having the principles
for which they struggled confided to your care, allow
them to be violated in your hands?
[5] . . . I conjure
you to . . . leave an unshackled press as a legacy to
your children. You remember the press in your hour of
conviviality and mirth--Oh! do not desert it in this
its day of trial.

. . . Gentlemen, I fearlessly consign myself, and what
is of more consequence, your country's press, into your
hands. I do not ask for the impunity which the
American press enjoys . . . but give me what a British
subject has a right to claim--impartial justice,
administered by those principles of English law that
our forefathers fixed and have bequeathed. Let not the
sons of the rebels look across the border to the sons
of the loyalists and reproach them that their press is
not free.

The judge told the jurors that in his opinion, Howe was guilty.
No matter. The jurors needed only ten minutes to pronounce him
innocent. Historian Joseph Andrew Chisholm described the scene
that followed:

[Howe] was borne by the populace to his home amidst
acclamations. The people kept holiday that day and the
next. All the sleds in town were turned out in
processions, with banners; and all ranks and classes
seemed to join in felicitations on the triumph of the
press. [7]

Those were the days, eh? The impugned magistrates resigned. The
governor-in-council named replacements, who themselves refused to
take office. The journey to responsible government in Nova
Scotia and in Canada was inexorably underway. [8] But the press
was not free. [9] Just eight years later, Howe's successor as
publisher of the Novascotian was imprisoned for failing to pay
damages in a series of Tory libel suits. [10] And 88 years later,
the Cape Breton labour leader J. B. McLachlan was imprisoned for
seditious libel--the very crime of which Howe had been
accused. [11]

Mercifully, we don't have trials for seditious libel today, but
we do have a panoply of laws and practices that restrain freedom
of the press to a degree that shocks the daughters and sons of
the rebels--on those rare occasions when they happen to notice
what the sons and daughters of the loyalists are up to. We also
have a culture infused with what Edgar Z. Friedenberg described
as "deference to authority." [12] Friedenberg, an American
sociologist who moved in the late 1960s from Boston University to
Dalhousie, described the unspoken trade-off that defines the
relationship between Canadians and their government.

He said Canadians habitually accede to regulations and
restrictions that would excite rebellion among Americans. In
return, Canadian officials generally (though not always) show
restraint in the exercise of their authority.

There are hundreds of examples of this, but one of the simplest
is jaywalking. As someone who grew up in Boston, I'm here to
tell you that Canadians are at best timorous jaywalkers. In Nova
Scotia, at least, a pedestrian need only dangle a foot near the
curb to bring cars screeching to a halt. But a vacationing New
Yorker who gets stopped for speeding by a Mountie invariably
remarks on how polite cops here are.

In Canadian Constitutional law, deference to authority produces
an obsessive concern over "balancing" the right of free speech
with a myriad other rights and social interests. In the United
States, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom
of speech," [13] whereas a Canadian's right to "freedom of
thought, belief, opinion, and expression," [14]are "subject . . .
to such reasonable limits, prescribed by law, as can be
demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." [15]
That's from Section One of the Charter, which might be called the
Mack Truck clause.

The trouble with this so-called balancing act is that it's very
easy, in the words of the American critic Nat Hentoff, to balance
free speech to the back of the bus. [16] In the years since the
Charter took effect, the Supreme Court of Canada has spent
thousands of pages discussing the appropriate limits to free
speech. But rarely, if ever, has the court taken even a few
pages to explain why free speech is important, why it is a
crucial limit on the powers of government, why it is a defining
characteristic of a free society.

Because he was a bit of a rebel, Friedenberg found Canadians'
respect for the powers-that-be unsettling. But he had to admit,
the tacit bargain made Canada a pleasant place to live.

The downside of that bargain can be seen in the continuing row
over how much Canadians should be allowed to know about the
notorious plea bargain that sent Karla Homolka to prison for a
maximum of just twelve years, and a minimum of four. Remember
that Robert Latimer got a minimum of 10 years without parole for
a crime motivated by compassion.

In a humiliating spectacle for a country that fancies itself
free, Canadian border guards stopped cars crossing the Peace
Bridge near Niagara Falls and searched for copies of a Buffalo
newspaper. The paper had reprinted a Washington Post story about
Homolka's quasi-secret trial and the court's selective ban on
publication of information about it.

I'm sure you all remember the Monty Pythonesque details. From
each motorist interdicted, the border cops seized all but one
copy of the offending paper. All but one. It was okay to have
one, but you couldn't have two, as if fax machines and
photocopiers did not exist. Only a government--a Canadian
government--could device a policy this tortured.

The effort at enforcement was about as effective as the Chinese
government's attempts to stop news of the Tiananmen Square
uprising from flooding into the country on fax and phone lines.

The humiliation deepened when a Detroit radio station styled
itself Radio Free Windsor and began discussing banned bits on the
air. At one point, one of these media personalities actually
stood on the riverbank with a bullhorn and hollered banned
information across the border. Just as Howe feared, the sons of
the rebels were taunting the sons of the loyalists that their
press was not free. Canadian authorities stopped short of
jamming the airwaves, but some cable companies began blacking out
U.S. news broadcasts lest something our government didn't approve
of be revealed.

For months, Canadians with access to the Internet had been able
to read details of the trial--or purported details anyway--on the
Usenet group alt.fan.Karla-Homolka. But as the flap reached a
crescendo, one university administration after another caved in
and ordered alt.fan.k-h deleted from their computers. Even
universities outside Ontario, where the ban's authority was
legally doubtful, took this step.

This happened even though only a small percentage of the postings
in alt.fan.k-h included banned information. Mostly, participants
debated the merits of the ban. Many of them who thought the ban
a good thing and condemned attempts to get around it. So when
universities took it upon themselves to police the ban, they were
censoring far more than the judge had done.

That's the first thing to be noted about Internet censorship. It
is inevitably a blunt and crude instrument. Deleting an entire
Usenet group--or worse still, an entire Usenet hierarchy--because
a few of the postings it attracts may contain banned or offensive
information makes about as much sense as burning a carton of
books because one or two pages in one or two of the books may
depict anal intercourse or teenagers having sex.

On the Internet, the utterly predictable result was a scramble
for other computerized routes to the forbidden information.
Howard Rheingold, a San Francisco computer journalist, points out
that the military precursor of the Internet was designed by the
RAND corporation to withstand nuclear attack. [17] RAND
accomplished this goal, not by entombing net bunkers in yards and
yards of concrete, but by devising its uniquely decentralized
structure. The net has no centre. It is a web of interconnected
nodes. A serendipitous result of this structure is that the net
resists censorship. In the words of net pioneer John Gilmore,
"The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around
it." [18]

This circumvention continues to this day. Yesterday's Globe and
Mail carried a front page story about a police investigation into
the decision by lawyer Kenneth Murray to withdraw as attorney for
Paul Bernardo. [19] The story is written in something that
resembles code. The reporter appears to be straining to let
readers know something he can't quite come right out and tell
them.

Now it happens that the banned newsgroup alt.fan.karla-homolka
mysteriously resurfaced on my Usenet server sometime in the last
few weeks. To readers of alt.fan.k-h, and to readers of the
various listservs and Usenet groups that supplanted it, the Globe
story appears to confirm what we've been reading on the Internet
for weeks: That Bernardo's lawyer resigned because he had come
into possession of video tapes that purportedly show the crimes
unfolding. Incredibly enough, police missed the tapes in their
month's long search of the Bernardo residence.

There is in all this a contempt for the public, a belief that
potential jurors are too weak-witted or prejudiced to put aside
reports they've heard about a case and decide a defendant's guilt
or innocence on the evidence adduced at trial. Judges can decide
such things because judges are so much wiser than us. And we are
nothing if not deferential to authority.

It is, by the way, a mistake to conclude--as many net enthusiasts
have proclaimed--that the publication ban has been a complete
failure. Most Canadians know much less about the Homolka case
than they would know if the ban had not been in place. A few
Canadian netters know a lot of details about the case--or think
they do, for who is to say how much of the net gossip is
accurate. One of the main effects of the ban has been a
proliferation of what may turn out to be misinformation.

Ironically, while the bastions of free thought that are Canada's
universities were busy doing the government's thought-police
work, some cable companies were having second thoughts.
Montreal-based Videotron, one of Canada's biggest cable
suppliers, announced Friday that it would no longer try to black
out news programs that might contain material the government
doesn't want Canadians to hear.

It's a sad day when cable companies have a deeper appreciation
for free speech than university presidents.

I think many universities got bad legal advice, and I think I
know why. I have worked for a lot of big media companies--the
CBC, the Globe and Mail, Southam--and I've often consulted with
the specialists in media law whom they employ. I've also worked
for media outlets who used their corporate legal departments--or
worse, a general practitioner on Main Street--to advice them on
media law issues.

Here's the difference. Media law is an arcane specialty,
with which generalists tend to be uncomfortable. So they tend to
err on the side of caution. They are trained, after all, to keep
their clients out of trouble, and if you don't publish something,
you won't get into trouble. Media law specialists are not only
more confident of their field, they also recognize that legal
dangers have to be weighed against the journalistic purpose of
the organization.

Suppose Waterloo had said to its lawyer: "We are an institution
that owes its very existence, and its continuing worth, to a free
marketplace of ideas. And we consider discussion of the criminal
justice system to be of the utmost public importance. Naturally,
we don't want to flout the law in a way that invites prosecution.
We are prepared to accept some risk, but not an imprudent risk.
What advice can you give us as to the likelihood that we will be
prosecuted under these circumstances, and our chances of
successfully defending ourselves if we are charged with
contempt?"

With that mandate, might a lawyer have given different advice?
Especially a lawyer well versed in communications precedents, and
in computer technology? Maybe not. But there are a host of
questions about the legal status of Usenet posts, none of which
have been arbitrated by courts. Given Usenet's decentralized,
automated, passive existence, who is the publisher? A node that
holds a posting? A node that automatically passes it on? We
don't blame telephone companies for illegal acts committed on the
phone. They are common carriers.

What about Usenet locations outside Ontario. What was the status
of the Ontario court order in Nova Scotia? The New Brunswick
courts didn't prosecute the Globe and Mail when it
published--outside New Brunswick--banned details of a civil suit
between the McCain brothers. The obscure literary magazine in
Victoria that published information in the Homolka trial was
likewise never prosecuted--though that didn't stop the
attorney-general in that province from uttering the fatuous,
chilling, authoritarian advice that anyone who picked up one of
the 'zines should turn it over to police.

In blocking access to the Homolka news group and sundry other
Usenet groups, university administrators have, in my view, made a
strategic blunder. Such deletions imply an acknowledgment of
their status as publishers (akin to newspapers or radio stations)
rather than as common carriers (such as telephone and cable
companies). The much more accurate and benign view of the
Internet as a network of common carriers has already gained a
foothold in U.S. courts, in a case called Cubby v.
Compuserve. [20]

Let me make one final point about the technical feasibility of
net censorship. And by the way, it's probably a measure of
journalistic chutzpa that a reporter would come to the computer
science department at Waterloo and presume to pontificate on
technical issues of computer communications.

Many of you will be familiar with a recent episode in which
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, a husband-and-wife team of
U.S. immigration lawyers, sent messages to more than 5,000 Usenet
groups soliciting clients wanting help getting green cards. [21]
This was a flagrant violation of netiquette, the loose code of
self-restraint that permits the otherwise anarchic net to
survive. If copied, the advertising ploy has the potential to
overwhelm the system. Outraged netters retaliated with thousands
of bogus e-mail messages, crashing the computer where the
lawyers' e-mail account was located. Reams of blank pages spewed
out of the lawyers' fax machine. The service provider
disconnected Canter and Siegel--though it backed down when they
threatened suit.

Still, Canter and Siegel consider the experiment a success. They
claim it brought in $100,000 of new business, and say they plan to
use the tactic again. This, in turn, so outraged a Norwegian
hacker that he devised a "cancelbot," a program that scans Usenet
for messages from Cantor and Siegel and deletes them. To do
this, the cancelbot has to pretend to be Siegel and Canter, to
commit electronic forgery, in effect. That has provoked more
ethical debate. After all, if a cancelbot could seek and destroy
Canter's and Siegel's ads, could it not just as easily seek and
destroy violations of the Homolka trial ban, or references to
anal sex, or messages that praise Catherine MacKinnon?

We are sure to see a lot more of this. Just as happened with
copy protection of software, the technological battle between
censors and circumventors will ebb and flow. Who knows how it
will turn out. My hunch is that the decentralized structure of
the Internet, and the sheer quantum of data flow probably gives
the circumventors a long-term edge.

The other great arena of Internet censorship is Usenet's alt.sex
hierarchy. "alt.sex" and its progeny are replete with material
that many would consider loathsome, and many more would deem
puerile. But the alt.sex groups are also among the most popular
on the Internet. Their use still constitutes a small, if not
tiny, fraction of net activity, but at least as many Canadians
read them as, say, read the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. This
suggests to me that there exists a considerable hunger for
information about sex, for discussion of sex, and even for the
kinds of experimental, cyber-erotic experiences that the net
offers. It suggests that the net is fulfilling an unmet need.

Years of following battles over free speech have led me to
formulate Parker Barss Donham's First Law of Censorship, which I
think sums up the debate pretty thoroughly. (I don't actually
have a Second Law of Censorship, but I'm leaving the slot open in
case I think of something. [22])
Donham's First Law of Censorship
states that "Most citizens are implacably opposed to censorship
in any form--except censorship of whatever they personally happen
find offensive."

Thus, exactly as the First Law predicts, Felix Holtzman is
opposed to censorship, except for censorship of art he considers
dumb. Rosanne Skoke is opposed to censorship, except for
censorship of filthy homosexual propaganda. Michelle Landsberg
is opposed to censorship, except for censorship of whatever she
considers demeaning to women. Attorney General Marion Boyd is
opposed to censorship, except censorship of the deal her
department cut with Karla Homolka. Universities are opposed to
censorship . . .

Well, no. Universities are an exception to Donham's First Law of
Censorship. In a bizarre and disheartening turn of events,
universities have become the most censorious institutions in our
society, devoting enormous energy to formulating and
promulgating lengthy codes detailing what can and cannot be said
on campus.

Of course the problem with a society governed by Donham's First
Law of Censorship is that no one objects to banal, inoffensive,
non-controversial speech--or at least authorities rarely bother
to censor it. The only real test of our devotion to free speech
is whether we tolerate rude, obnoxious, in-your-face
speech--whether we tolerate, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's
wonderful phrase, "freedom for the thought that we hate.
[23]"
Freedom for ideas--Holmes again--"that we loathe and believe to
be fraught with death." [24]

These are not new arguments and I don't expect them to persuade
people determined to subordinate free speech to other values they
consider pre-eminent--determined, in other words, to shut other
people up. But it is distressing to see so much of the impetus
for censorship arising from groups associated with the political
left--specifically from feminists and minority groups. To be
sure, feminism is no monolith, and many feminists are dedicated
defenders of free speech and civil liberties. But much of recent
feminist political ferment has been censorious, prudish, and
appallingly willing to make common cause with the most misogynist
elements of the political right.

Even leaving aside the principles of human freedom of expression,
this strategy seems willfully naive. (I must pause here to
acknowledge Professor John Fekete of Trent University, who
sharpened my thinking on this point. Fekete was the first
professor on the political left to find the courage to speak out
against the Ontario government's policy of zero-tolerance for
controversial campus speech. He is the author of a forthcoming
book about the rise of censorship on Canadian campuses called
"Moral Panic." [25])

If, as Fekete and I believe, women and various minorities really
are oppressed, then they are foolhardy to endorse greater powers
of censorship for state authorities, because the powers thus
granted will inevitably be turned against them. If, on the other
hand, women and minorities really do have access to the levers of
state power, then their claim to oppressed status is fraudulent.
Either way, their efforts to silence others are wrong.

In the Supreme Court of Canada's Butler decision on the
censorship of pornography, the unanimous opinion written by Mr.
Justice John Sopinka purported to shift from a standard that
imposed moral judgements to one that weighed the potential harm
to women and children posed by sexually explicit expressions.
The decision represented a triumph for the theories of the
radical American feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine
MacKinnon--theories that have been consistently rebuffed by U.S.
courts.

In fact, the Butler decision did nothing to change the
government's entrenched habit of imposing moral judgements. The
feminist argument simply provided the court with a trendy,
progressive sounding rationale for imposing those same, tired
moral judgements.

In a delicious irony, one of the first acts of post-Butler
censorship was Canada Customs' seizure of two books by Dworkin
bound for a lesbian bookstore in Montreal. Pro-censorship
feminists, by the way, remain in a state of denial about this.
They either deny that such seizures are taking place, or they
insist that they merely represent a misapplication of the Butler
decision by police. Well the seizures are taking place--ask any
gay bookstore in Canada--and surprise surprise, the police
approach is exactly what civil libertarians predicted it would
be.

I'd like to leave you with one final point about the Internet. I
remember a New Yorker cartoon from sometime in the 1960s or 70s,
when computers were just getting a foothold in society. It
showed a huge computer--an old Univac with whirring tape
drives--sitting on a hilltop. A mob of farmers were rushing up
the hill, attacking the computer with scythes and pitchforks.
That's the image non-technical people had of computers, isn't it.
Computers, we feared, would be Big Brother's tool, instruments of
oppression, invaders of privacy, displacers of persons.

All those dangers are still with us, and all those fears. The
use of bar codes and scanners pose great challenges to a free
society. But up until now, at least, computers have shown
themselves to be capable of empowering people in ways we did not
foresee 20 years ago.

A. J. Liebling wrote that freedom of the press is guaranteed only
to those who own one. [26] That's a phrase with some resonance in
Catherine MacKinnon's writing. She points out, rightly, that
illiteracy and poverty are major barriers to free speech,
barriers impervious to any First Amendment or Charter of Rights
and Freedoms. If netters are fiercely protective of their
freedom to communicate, it may be because they perceive exactly
this. The Internet promises to achieve what no charter of rights
can: putting printing presses in the hands of many. In a world
dominated by powerful unitary, publishing conglomerates, it
offers a potent antidote to the corruption such power inevitably
brings: a new mode of communication by many to many. Greater
government power to censor such a medium is the last thing any
democrat should endorse.

[Parker Barss Donham (pdonham@fox.nstn.ns.ca)
is a staff writer for
the Canadian edition of Reader's Digest Magazine, a political
columnist for the Halifax Daily News (and nine other Nova
Scotia community newspapers), and a weekly panelist/debater on
CBC-Television's First Edition in Nova Scotia.]

[1]
In an Internet post dated 12 July 1993, John McCarthy,
professor of computer science at Stanford
(jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU),
reported the joke as follows: "A
Jew and a Scotsman have dinner. At the end of the dinner
the Scotsman is heard to say, 'I'll pay.' The newspaper
headline next morning says, 'Jewish ventriloquist found dead
in alley.'"

[2]
Franklin, of Massey College, University of Toronto, spoke
before me at the conference. In what may have been an
offhand comment, she suggested that the problem of sexually
explicit images being displayed on computer screens in
university computer labs might be solved by having "dirty
picture rooms." She added that pornography should be treated
as a "public health problem," akin to smoking or toxic waste
disposal.

[3]
An embarrassing admission: The preceding five paragraphs of
this talk were written on the fly, in response to Ursula
Franklin's comments. As best I could, I recalled the words
attributed here to James Madison. Once home, I located the
precise quotation as I originally transcribed it; but I have
been unable to find the original citation. I have sought
help from several Madison scholars, and most thought the
wording a bit flowery for the fourth president of the United
States. Some suggested it might have been Jefferson. I'm
still trying to nail it down.

[4]
Kesterson, Wilfred H., A History of Journalism in Canada (Toronto) McClelland and Stewart, 1967.

[5]
Extracting a few sentences from a six-and-one-quarter-hour
oration necessarily involves editorial license. For the
sake of clarity, I took the further license of transposing
the first two sentences of this paragraph.

[6]
Howe, Joseph, "Speech to the Jury," 1 March 1835, quoted in
The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe, Joseph
Andrew Chisholm, ed. (Halifax) The Chronicle Publishing
Company Ltd., 1909.

[7]
Chisholm, Joseph Andrew, ed., The Speeches and Public
Letters of Joseph Howe (Halifax) The Chronicle Publishing
Company Ltd., 1909.

[21]
see: "Free Speech and the Internet," The Nation, 13 June
1994; and "Battle for the Soul of the Internet," Time, 25
July 1994, and "Censors Become a Force on Cyberspace
Frontier," New York Times, 29 June 1994.

[22]
Since delivering this paper, I have been fiddling with a
draft Second Law of Censorship: "Everything offends
someone; Everyone is offended by something."